Onboard Autonomy · Space & Air

The decision should happen where the data is. Not where the bandwidth allows.

Hanseatic AI builds the inference stack that runs on satellites and uncrewed aircraft — turning raw sensor feeds into decisions in orbit and in flight, before a single bit touches a ground station.

Est. 2026 Edge Inference · EO · ISR · Autonomy Hardware-Agnostic Runtime Status: In Test
01 — The Bottleneck

Sensors outran the pipe a decade ago.

Modern imaging payloads generate data far faster than any spacecraft can send it home. The constraint is not the camera and not the model. It is a narrow, congested, physically bounded radio link and a handful of ground stations the vehicle can only reach for minutes at a time.

Spectrum
375MHz

The width of the X-band slice (8,025–8,400 MHz) that most Earth observation satellites still share for downlink. It is already congested.

Contact Window
~10min

Typical duration of a single ground station pass in low Earth orbit. Everything not transmitted in that window waits for the next one.

Wasted Payload
Up to 80%

Share of downlink volume that onboard filtering can reclaim by discarding cloud-obscured and low-value frames before transmission.

Downlink Budget · Single Orbit Model
Sensor Data Captured
Downlinked — Store & Forward
Downlinked — Onboard Inference First
Illustrative model based on published industry figures for downlink capacity and scene composition. Not measured product performance.
02 — What We Build

An inference stack designed for vehicles that cannot phone home.

Hanseatic AI is a software company. We do not sell you a board. We make the models you already care about run inside the power, thermal, and radiation budget of the platform you have already flown.

01

Compress the Model, Not the Mission

Quantization, pruning, and distillation tuned against the actual accelerator on the bus — not a datacenter proxy. We target the operating point where accuracy loss stops mattering to the analyst and power savings start mattering to the spacecraft.

  • INT8 / INT4 post-training quantization
  • Structured pruning with accuracy floors
  • Per-target kernel scheduling
02

Decide Before You Transmit

Cloud screening, change detection, and object classification run at capture time. Frames with nothing in them never enter the downlink queue. What reaches the ground is a detection with a chip attached, not a terabyte of ocean.

  • Onboard triage and prioritization
  • Semantic downlink — send the answer
  • Operator-tunable confidence gating
03

Survive the Environment

Single-event upsets are not an edge case in orbit; they are the weather. Our runtime assumes bit flips, watchdog resets, and thermal throttling, and is built to degrade into a known-good state rather than a silent wrong answer.

  • Fault-tolerant inference scheduling
  • Checkpointed recovery on upset
  • Graceful degradation policies
03 — Architecture

KONTOR

The Hanseatic League ran its trade through kontore — fortified outposts far from home, granted the authority to decide for themselves because a message to Lübeck took months. Our runtime carries the name for the same reason.

Mission LogicOperator-defined

Tasking rules, confidence thresholds, downlink priority. Reconfigurable on orbit without a firmware push.

Model LibraryPortable

Detection, segmentation, change detection, and screening models compiled per target. Bring your own weights or start from ours.

KONTOR RuntimeCore

Scheduling, memory management, fault tolerance, and power governance. The layer that makes an untrusted accelerator behave like a flight component.

Hardware AbstractionPortable

One model artifact, many targets. Retargeting a payload does not mean rewriting a mission.

Your Compute PayloadNot ours

Space-grade FPGAs, VPUs, shielded COTS modules, embedded GPUs on airframes. We meet the hardware you selected.

Model
Software and integration. No hardware to qualify, no new box to fit in the stack, no second supply chain.
Targets
Radiation-tolerant FPGAs, vision processing units, shielded commercial modules, and embedded GPU platforms on uncrewed aircraft.
Deployment
Models and mission logic update over the existing command link. No hardware access required after launch.
Data Posture
Inference runs entirely on the vehicle. Imagery never leaves the platform unless the mission logic decides it should.
Status
Prototype in structured testing. We are selecting integration partners for first flight demonstrations and are open about what has and has not yet been proven in the environment.
04 — Where It Matters

Latency is a capability, not a metric.

The difference between an answer in ninety minutes and an answer in ninety seconds is not efficiency. It is whether the information was worth collecting.

Earth Observation

Stop paying to downlink clouds

A large fraction of every optical constellation's downlink budget is spent transmitting cloud cover. Screening at capture reclaims that capacity for imagery somebody will actually look at — and raises effective revisit without launching another satellite.

Maritime Domain Awareness

Find the vessel, not the ocean

Dark vessel detection is a needle-in-haystack problem where the haystack costs bandwidth to move. Detecting onboard and downlinking contact reports turns a storage problem into a tracking problem.

ISR & Tactical Air

Autonomy under denied comms

An uncrewed aircraft in contested spectrum cannot assume a link to a ground processor. Onboard inference lets the platform classify, prioritize, and act during the periods when it is on its own — which are the periods that matter.

Disaster & Response

Alerts on the first pass

Wildfire ignition, flood extent, and structural damage lose value by the hour. Detecting the signature onboard means the alert goes out on the pass that saw it, not the pass after the analyst got to it.

05 — Company

Why Hanseatic

The Hanseatic League was a network without a capital. For three centuries it moved goods across the North and Baltic Seas through independent ports that shared standards, charts, and law — but made their own decisions, because waiting for central authority meant losing the season.

That is the architecture we think orbital and airborne autonomy is converging on. Not one intelligence pipeline on the ground that every vehicle queues for, but a fleet of capable nodes running common standards and deciding locally. The bandwidth is not coming. The compute already went up there.

We are early, and we would rather say so plainly than pad a website. The runtime is in structured testing. We are looking for integration partners with a payload, a bandwidth problem, and the patience to prove something properly.

“A network of outposts, each trusted to decide for itself, connected by common standards rather than a common master.”
The Kontor Model · c. 1350 & c. 2026
Get in Touch

Tell us what your downlink is costing you.

If you operate a constellation, build uncrewed platforms, or integrate ISR systems, we want to hear the specifics of your bottleneck — sensor, target hardware, and the decision you wish you could make onboard.